Never Too Much
by Mariel Nightstalker
Summary: Edward can never have too much of Harry. Harry has his motives. CROSSOVER SLASH Edward/Harry.
1. Chapter 1

Note: What are you reading? The unthinkable. Enjoy, hate, and/or comment. Tell me how you feel and how you don't feel.

Oh, and yeah, it's set to a super-soppy love song, too.

~000~

**Never Too Much**

_Oh my love_

_A thousand kisses from you is never too much_

_I just don't want to stop_

_Oh my love_

_A million days in your arms is never too much_

_I just don't want to stop_

_Oh my love_

-Odahl feat. Ashley J.B., _Never Too Much_

~000~

It'd been a year since Bella left him (an event that caused him to go on crying soundlessly for days). Much to everyone's surprise, himself included, Edward had been starting to act normal again about a month ago. When she'd said she was leaving he thought that he would never feel normal again. After everything that they'd been through together, everything he had given her and everything that she put him through…she just left. He still didn't know why. She'd been vague and evasive, but he feared that, like Rosalie, the unfulfilled desire for children had caused her to go just a little nuts. The worst part was that she'd looked at him in the months leading up to their separation as though it was his fault, as if it was his choice and not hers to become a Vampire (and by proxy, infertile).

The whole thing made his head hurt. He hated everything about the situation, especially the part about having no way of contacting her. He didn't know if she was alive or dead, where she was, or what she was doing.

But perhaps it was for the best. Out of sight, out of mind. Well, that was the theory, anyway.

He had started listening to music again, and even got a job writing code for small businesses. He enjoyed the well-defined and ordered universe of coding, the anonymity of it, and the quiet hours he could spend solving problems in his room without his family hanging all over him as though he was in danger of slitting his wrists at any moment. Somehow, even without Bella, he started to feel like a complete person, and less like a roughly-torn and crumpled half of one.

And then, just as everything was starting to be okay again, Bella came back into his life.

She wasn't alone.

~000~

The scene looked like something not of this world- a family portrait painted by a mental patient.

There stood his beautiful parents and siblings on one side, none of them sure what to do or what to make of this new development. And on the other stood Bella. That is, Bella and an unknown human man with a mind like an impenetrable fortress. Edward was standing between the two. He was beginning to wish that he'd followed his initial cowardly instinct and gone sprinting in the opposite direction when he smelled Bella's approach.

Bella cleared her throat.

"Well…I'm back."

Carlisle's eyes flicked quickly to Edward. Edward remained externally impassive, but Jasper's sudden creation of a cloud of calm was not undesired. Bella smiled nervously, and Esme smiled back. Leaving the crowd, she approached Bella and took her hands into hers.

"Bella, it's not that we aren't happy to see you. We are; you had us worried. It's just that we didn't think that we would see you like this, and with someone else. Now, before we all sit down and talk about this, why don't you introduce us to this young man?"

She called him young because he was young in comparison to them, but he had to be at least thirty-five, maybe more. He looked ridiculous standing next to Bella, who was preserved in all of the bloom of nineteen. Edward couldn't help but observe that the man wouldn't look ridiculous under different circumstances. He was not bad looking. In fact, he was rather good-looking, if Edward was being honest.

"This is Harry; I met him in London a couple of months after leaving, and we've been seeing each other. Things have arrived at a point where I thought that it might be best to bring him home to meet all of you, if you know what I mean."

Bella had picked up a faint British accent, but the black rage filling Edward prevented him from noticing. Never in his 100-plus years of unloving had he witnessed such a brazenly rude gesture. He didn't care that she was still technically his wife. This was just rude, and cruel, and inconsiderate. Who did she think she was, prancing in here and rubbing her new boyfriend in their faces?

Jasper sent out a stronger wave of serenity, and Edward felt his anger begin to cool. He slowly unclenched his hands and allowed himself to be soothed. Jasper discretely shuffled closer and touched Edward's bare elbow to strengthen the effect. Edward shut his eyes for a moment and then opened them.

Esme had begun herding everyone to the common area. Edward and Jasper brought up the rear.

Bella had changed; she'd cut off her hair and dyed it a hazy red, and she was neatly dressed. She was starting to carry herself like a woman.

It made Edward furious. Why did she have to leave him in order to become an adult? He had tried to nurture her growth; he really had. If he had smothered her, he hadn't meant to. Grief began to blend with his fury, turning his emotions into a nauseating and dizzying soup.

He turned his head to the window. He couldn't look at her.

She was talking about her life in London, but he blocked out the sound of her voice. Instead, when he could bear it, he looked at Harry. So this was the man that'd replaced him. He was modestly attired in a zippered sweater and cords. He wore stylish glasses and had a thick head of hair for a human male of his age. Besides his looks, he seemed ordinary enough. Then Edward noticed his hands. They were strangely calloused and scarred. One of the scars, an especially thick one that started on his middle knuckle, extended down the top of his hand and disappeared into his sleeve.

Harry noticed Edward watching him and met his eyes. His mind was still a mysterious blank. Edward did not look away. He knew he was being rude, but no one else had noticed their stare-down. He wasn't going to be the one to back down. Harry frowned and then raised his eyebrows, mouthing, "What?"

And just like that Edward knew that Harry had no idea. He didn't know that Bella was married, much less that she was married to someone in the room.

Edward cleared his throat. Bella's description of her new apartment was cut short.

"Bella, why haven't you told him?"

"Told him what? Which thing?"

Realizing that she thought that he meant their vampirism, he clarified. He held up his left hand and pointed at the place where his wedding ring used to be. Bella looked ashamed, much to his surprise. Harry looked quickly from Edward and then to Bella.

"Bella, what is he saying?"

The question was asked out of habit. Harry knew exactly what Edward implied. He looked at Edward with new eyes.

"Wow. You're her husband, aren't you?"

An extremely awkward conversation followed. With every revelation, Harry edged a little farther away from Bella on the sofa. Bella noticed and started to cry. Esme and Alice rushed to her side, and Edward left. Jasper stood to accompany him. Edward shook his head.

He stood on the verandah with his eyes closed, listening the music of nature. A human heartbeat entered the melody of birds, rain, and wind. Edward opened his eyes and turned. Harry stood nervously by the door, looking uncomfortable.

"Hey."

Edward remained silent.

"Look," Harry pushed his hair back from his forehead, "I know that I'm not your favorite person right now. I just wanted to let you know that I had no idea. When Bella and I met, I thought that she was just another nice girl. We started spending a lot of time together, and things started to get kind of serious. When she suggested meeting her family, I did not know that I would also be meeting her husband. So…sorry, I guess."

Edward turned away from him, facing the greenery of the woods. Harry shuffled his feet, and then made to leave.

"Wait!"

Harry paused.

"I intend to divorce Bella. If you have feelings for her, I won't say that you can't continue dating her. What she did wasn't right, but if you two have a…a connection, or what have you, I won't stand in the way. That would be stupid and cruel."

Harry stepped onto the verandah and closed the door behind him. He came to stand beside Edward.

"I appreciate that; I know that that must have taken a lot to say, especially from a young bloke like yourself. But I don't think that things are going to work out with Bella and me. We…I have a difficult time trusting people. That's what drew me to Bella; she seemed so artless, so genuine. This has been a cruel awakening."

Edward looked at him, and saw from his face that it was true. He tried to read his mind, but once again met a blank. Harry looked puzzled.

"Is there something on my face?"

"No. I'm sorry for staring. Bad habit."

Harry smiled, "That's alright. Speaking of bad habits, do you have any cigarettes in the house? I quit years ago, but I think that this situation deserves a good self-destructive smoke."

They did, in fact have cigarettes. It was a hospitality rule left over from the 1950s that Carlisle had neglected to adjust to the new modern sensibilities. Edward left Harry on the verandah and fished out the pack of cigarettes from the drawer in the kitchen. It was buried beneath a veritable mountain of cheese and fruit knives. He spared a moment's exasperation with his mother and her culinary collecting habits.

Harry gratefully accepted the cigarettes and the little box of matches. The stench of tobacco smoke was unpleasant, but Harry wasn't. Now that he knew that Harry did not intend to pursue Bella, Edward found himself warming to the Englishman. He strained his ears and faintly picked up his family arguing with Bella inside. Apparently his presence had been a suppressant; in his absence, Carlisle was using, for him, some very strong language to express his displeasure with her actions.

"So what do you do?"

Edward shrugged, "Nothing much. I'm an independent contractor; I do some coding. What about you?"

"I work for my government." This was announced in the same tones that one would use to say "I'm a coroner" or "I scoop dog shit for rich people".

"Oh," Edward snickered, "You make it sound unpleasant."

"It is. I've been meaning to quit since my first week, but somehow twenty years have gone by and I'm still there. I must have sold my soul when I signed that contract."

"You say fifteen years. If you don't mind my asking, how old are you?"

"Not at all. I am all of thirty-seven years old."

"So…you were seventeen when your government hired you?"

Harry shot him a look, "Not just a pretty face, are you?"

Edward caught a glimpse of something in the blank that was Harry's mind. It wasn't an image, but rather a sort of…impression. It was an amalgamation of sound and sensation that shivered through his fingertips when he sensed that it was there. He felt a rush like the rush of fresh blood on his tongue and turned away. He swallowed the saliva that flooded his mouth, ashamed at letting his animal side come leaping to the fore with such abandon.

"Look at me."

It was a command. Harry had come across as a mild and soft-voiced suburbanite, but now there was something primal and powerful in his manner that jerked at Edward's spine. He obeyed. Harry's eyes were an intense green behind his stylish glasses. Edward hadn't noticed their color before. They were the same color as the verdant mosses overhanging the glass roof of the verandah.

Harry was looking at him keenly. "You're not human, are you?"

Edward was taken aback. What?

"I beg your pardon?"

Harry tilted his head and appraised him from head to toe. "You're not, are you? I will bet everything in my pocketbook that you are a Vampire, to be specific, though I am not sure what breed. You're not young, but you show no signs of decay. And then there's your eyes…"

Edward began to panic. He knew that Jasper would feel it, and beamed a warning to Carlisle for good measure. The buzz of his family's conversation died. They were coming.

Somehow, Harry knew what he'd done. Fear and adrenaline began pouring out of his scent. It was intoxicating. Edward had never smelled so much adrenaline in one person before, and so quickly!

In a flash Harry leaped over the railing of the verandah and sprinted around the side of the house to the car. Edward followed, Emmett hot on his heels.

They were too late. It seemed impossible that a human had outrun them, especially one over the age of twenty-five, but he had. They went to the garage and piled into their respective vehicles. Alice was placed in the leading car out of habit, but soon revealed, much embarrassed, that Harry's future was covered by some kind of impenetrable haze.

There was no sign of the car on the road. They pursued their usual channels of tracking. The vehicle was found, abandoned, on the side of the road not twenty miles away. Harry Potter did not appear on any of the airport, bus, or boat camera feeds that they hacked. They filed a missing person report, and it was revealed that Harry Potter did not exist anywhere.

Bella was stunned, as was the rest of the family. She had met Harry at a museum, and he'd seemed perfectly normal. He had a cell phone, credit cards, a driver's license, a normal apartment. In every way imaginable, he had seemed normal.

But when they went to England to hunt for him, the apartment turned out to technically belong to an elderly woman who was in the hospital. The credit cards were not on record. The driver's license could not be traced. As for the phone, the cellular service providers were under the impression that Harry's number belonged to a teenaged boy named Alan Abrams.

They tried hacking the various departments of the British government, but nothing they found access to had any record of him. They had several false trails with men that closely resembled Harry, but none of them turned out to be genuine.

It was useless; he'd fallen off the face of the earth.

~000~

The daydreams started when they'd given up the search.

They didn't start out sexual. At first Harry would just show up and hover in the background of Edward's dreams. But then his role increased to the point of conversation, then some innocent-enough petting…and finally sex.

Edward was an adult. He thought that he knew himself pretty well. But apparently he was wrong. He had somehow missed his subtle attraction to his own sex.

The daydreams were very realistic. They were too realistic, in fact, and soon became even more so. Edward began to fancy that he could taste and smell the world he imagined, and then he became convinced that it was true. The daydreams were also very pleasant, more so than anything else in his life at the time, short of hunting and feeding.

Bella was avoiding him, and he was happy to pretend that she didn't exist while exploring the realms of his imagination.

It seemed like there were never enough imagined moments with Harry. He never tired of talking to him, holding him, smelling him…

One day he decided that he didn't want to wake up from his daydream. A thousand nights with his imagined Scheherazade would never be enough.

And it was never too much.

~000~

End Never Too Much

~000~

Note: Oh yes. The pairing wasn't bad enough. I had to go and make it _weird, _didn't I? You know you like it.


	2. Chapter 2

Note: I wasn't going to do this, because I hate returning to my work, but upon re-reading Never Too Much, I decided that a counterpart from Harry's perspective was worth the effort. Note the change in genre.

~000~

They said he'd gone rogue. They were right.

Harry labored in the Auror Department for twelve years, working his way up the chain of command until he was second only to the Head. He faced discrimination because of his youth, because of his parents' legacy, and because of his fame. But all of the detractors in the world cannot argue with talent, and talent was what Harry had in spades.

And when he'd gone as high as he could go, something inside of him started to itch. He had been noticing it more and more since he joined the department, but hadn't focused on it until now. What he noticed were certain gaps in the law enforcement; loopholes, if you will. It wasn't that he thought that the system ought to be airtight. That was impossible. All human institutions are inherently flawed because they are made up of imperfect individuals. The problem was the size and number of loopholes.

The system was a sieve, and some very nasty things were slipping through.

Unfortunately, changes in policy take a long time; they have to, otherwise a sweeping wave of system changes would result in unforeseen injustices (which would take even longer to correct through further changes in policy).

He collaborated with Hermione to close some of the smaller loops. She was more than happy to spend her evenings sitting with him and looking over their case studies. Since the death of her daughter she had thrown herself into her work, while Ron had withdrawn behind a wall of depression. While Hermione worked feverishly to alter the law, Ron tried to overcome his feelings of failure in a combination of therapy and long evenings at the pub.

The itch grew stronger. In the seven months he spent adjusting one loop hole alone, innumerable crimes occurred without fear of recrimination. Children were turned by Werewolves and flung out by their families like so much trash. Ex-Death Eaters haunted night clubs and university campuses in search of easy marks. Vampires slipped out of jail using false names. It made him sick.

Could anyone blame him for taking matters into his own hands? He was an Auror. He had a strong sense of justice and a desire for social order. Why shouldn't he go off and become a vigilante? If the system wouldn't solve its own problems, Harry would solve the problems for it.

It took him three weeks to locate the pack of Werewolves that were making merry hell all over Scotland, and another to subdue the pack long enough to administer the new vaccine (based on an experiment found in the notes of one Potions Master Severus Snape, deceased). The vaccine had not been put into wide use, and was definitely not condoned by the Ministry, because it was extremely expensive. It also had some unfortunate side effects like weakened teeth enamel, insomnia around the time of the full moon, and hair loss. Purchasing the vaccine drained his family accounts and put him into debt. Late at night he would wonder if he had any right to force the vaccine upon the Werewolves against their will. But what choice did he have? It was free will or human life, and he chose the latter.

He squatted in other people's homes or outside and worked odd jobs under false names to survive. It was a brutal and complicated way to live, but it was worth it.

The Death Eaters were a much thornier problem. Many of them had assumed Muggle identities and snapped their wands, an act that put them outside of the Ministry's jurisdiction. They seemed to like the sick cycle of using the Muggle's own "primitive" weapons on them. Some even preferred the use of knives and blunt objects to spells.

It took him three years of tracking them one by one, and even then he was sure that he'd missed some. The point was that he killed them until they stopped killing others. He frightened them into submission and positively annihilated them. It was the bloodiest thing he had ever done. He did not regret his actions; his only regret was that they had been necessary in the first place.

He was tired of blood, tired of evil, and tired of being hunted as a fugitive by the very government he once worked for.

But it didn't matter that he was tired. He could not allow his grip to slacken until the last of the major evils was attended to.

Vampirism was an insidious and easily-overlooked problem. Some people refused to believe that Vampires existed at all, and some school texts did not include them in their syllabus of dangerous creatures. But Vampires were very real. They had interbred with other creatures for thousands of years, and existed in countless varieties. Some of them lived for only a few days, breeding like insects, and others could be considered immortal.

It was the latter category that worried him. These Vampires used their great age to their advantage. They had all the time in the world. When they wanted something and couldn't get it…they waited. They could afford to wait as long as they liked.

Tracing their influence in history, Harry saw the fingers of their intent stretching back sometimes for thousands of years before coming into fruition. It was a fascinating and terrifying realization.

How could he, a mortal of a mere thirty-six years of age, possibly topple their tyranny?

He had to try.

~000~

He met Bella about six months after beginning his research into the Vampire colonies of London (the largest concentrations of their population were in areas with frequent cloud cover). He knew immediately that she couldn't possibly be human. No human looked the way she did. From the way she carried herself he could tell that she was still fairly young, and therefore naïve.

He made his move, and she responded favorably. He was hoping to use her to find her colony, but she turned out to be American. This discovery coincided with a close call with the Auror Department. He decided that a temporary shift in focus from the U.K. to the U.S. would not be amiss, and acted accordingly.

Bella was shockingly easy to manipulate. Being gay, Harry was no master at manipulating women (he didn't have much practice), but Bella was naturally submissive and weak-willed. She never even suspected that his motives were less than pure, much less that he wasn't even attracted to her. He thanked Merlin that she had shyly requested that they take the physical side of the relationship slow. It saved him from having to find some excuse for why he couldn't stand the thought of touching her like that.

He suggested that they take a holiday to America, and she mentioned that perhaps she ought to introduce him to her family. He prayed that she meant her coven and agreed. At the very least it would get him out of England for the time being. The Aurors were closing their nets. A single man could only outwit an entire department of trained professionals for so long.

It was better than he'd hoped. She led him right into the inner circle, and unwittingly identified their leader.

There were seven of them, and they were all beautiful. They were one of the fortunate breeds of Vampire, then. Some had been bred with now-extinct creatures and were more animal than rational. These also had an unusual eye variation; he had seen pink eyes and burgundy in addition to the usual red, but theirs were amber.

He felt a gentle pressure on his mind and frowned. That was odd.

He needed to ascertain what sort of Vampires they were. Like humans, their morality came in shades of gray. Some were quite humanitarian, while others were violent. Some were so ruled by their blood lust that they were like wild animals in human-esque form. And some were insane with age and power. He had enough on his plate without needlessly attacking peaceful Vampires. Bella was a dead end. With her personality, she could never be truly dangerous. But that didn't mean that her coven was the same way.

They seemed very civilized, and definitely affluent, but appearances can be deceiving. What surprised him most was how young they were, with the exception of Carlisle.

He picked up that Bella had absconded without telling anyone where she was going or why. He frowned, and let himself be led into the living room. He sat beside Bella and surreptitiously assessed her siblings. The brawny one named Emmett looked like he could do some serious damage, as did his wife Rosalie and their brother Jasper. Jasper had been a soldier, Harry could tell. His shoulders still had the stiff set of a uniform.

The brunette man had not bothered to introduce himself like the others. He seemed hardly present, and had his eyes fixed out the window. There was a strange dichotomy to him. His hands were graceful like a musician's, and he carried himself softly, but there was something steely in him as well. He had two natures, like a Werewolf.

He felt his eyes on him and met them. He felt that mysterious pressure on his thoughts and frowned. Then, realizing that he didn't know the Vampire's reason for staring at him, he mouthed, "What?"

The subsequent revelation that Bella was married floored him. Bella, who had seemed so artless and, well, stupid, had been hiding a husband all this time? He didn't have to pretend to be surprised. He had underestimated her.

Harry pretended to be distressed about Bella's dishonesty, and began inching away from her in case she became violent. She interpreted his actions as rejection and began to cry. The brunette, now identified as Edward, left. Harry decided that this was his chance to properly assess their threat to the community at large.

He stood, "I think it would be best if I let you all discuss this as a family. I'll just leave for a few minutes, okay?"

This was accepted. Free to wander with impunity, he went in the same direction that Edward had gone. He found him standing on a glass-ceilinged verandah looking at the rain. No doubt smelling him, Edward turned to face him. He was very attractive, perhaps more so than everyone else in his family barring Rosalie.

He decided that he would use Edward to test the family. He pretended to have stumbled upon Edward by mistake and made to go. Edward called him back.

"I intend to divorce Bella. If you have feelings for her, I won't say that you can't continue dating her. What she did wasn't right, but if you two have a…a connection, or what have you, I won't stand in the way. That would be stupid and cruel."

Harry formally came onto the verandah and shut the door; it wouldn't do much, but it would serve as an additional barrier should he need to escape in a hurry. Using defensive spell work on Vampires was a tricky business; different spells had different effects, depending on the breed. As the Cullens were an unknown variation, he would prefer to prevent a situation requiring the use of his wand.

Not thinking too much about, he made a pretty speech about Bella's dishonesty letting him down. It must have been convincing because Edward looked like he believed him. There was another push on his mind. Harry was puzzled. Was Edward doing that? He had heard of some Vampires developing strange gifts from the interaction of the Vampire infection with their body's natural energy.

"Is there something on my face?"

Edward seemed embarrassed. The Vampires did not show much emotion, but Harry was beginning to detect the subtler facial changes that revealed their concealed feelings.

"No. I'm sorry for staring. Bad habit."

Harry smiled. He needed a moment alone to collect the magic necessary for casting a net over Edward's mind, so he asked for a cigarette. He didn't smoke, but it seemed as good an excuse as any. Edward left to find him some.

He closed his eyes and did his best to breathe normally. With his eyes still closed, he made the necessary rune shape with his hands and saw the darkness behind his lids light up as the invisible web of magic that filled all of nature became visible. He kept one ear out for Edward's return and quickly gathered the necessary threads of magic. He trapped them in the palms of his hands and then transferred them to his eyes. It would be easier to make eye contact than to lay his hands on Edward.

Edward returned. Harry smiled and took the offered cigarettes. He took his time lighting it and then made small talk. He needed a few extra minutes to weave the magic into its proper shape with his mind before he could cast it. It was simple enough; it just took a little while.

Somehow the subject of Harry's age came up. He wasn't really paying attention to their conversation, so when Edward pointed out that it was weird for him to have begun working for his government at age seventeen, Harry could have slapped himself for being so clumsy.

The spell would have worked best on an unsuspecting victim, but when that just wasn't possible, a startled mind would just as well.

Harry gave him a quick look, installing the first hook on Edward's consciousness, "Not just a pretty face, are you?"

There was that touch on his mind again. Except this time the spell was waiting for it. Edward seemed to sense the spell and looked away, swallowing. Harry decided that it was time. Edward was already off-balance. All he had to do was upset him completely, and then he could lay the web and be on his way.

"Look at me."

Edward met his eyes. Harry held them there with the spell. He knew just what to say.

"You're not human, are you?"

He was right. It unbalanced Edward just right. Harry slipped the spell around his mind like a noose around a rabbit's neck. Now he needed a strong emotion to fasten it there. He frightened Edward with a description of Vampiric characteristics, an act that revealed himself to be a threat to the coven's cover.

Edward seized up with panic, and Harry finished his spell. Then he realized that Edward had summoned the others somehow. His survival instincts kicked in, and when he remembered Emmett and Jasper, he felt genuine fear. His magic flared up, filling his limbs with power. It was time to go.

He hopped over the railing of the verandah and, with feet like the wind, sprinted to the car. As he jammed the key into the ignition and reversed, he thanked his lucky stars for his unusual relationship with his magic.

He drove long enough to lose them on the twisting roads and then parked the car. He wiped it of his fingerprints with a spell and then disapparatated. He landed in an alley he had spotted while riding the bus out of the airport with Bella. Thankfully it was abandoned like he'd hoped. He closed his eyes and let the tension from the spell casting melt away.

It was a primitive sort of magic that he'd invented while tracking down the final nest of Death Eaters. It created a connection not unlike the one he'd suffered through with Voldemort via his scar. The world was filled with magic, bound up in it like a net of glowing particles of electricity. This world could be accessed with the right brain, and a chance remark from Hermione about pre-wand magic being performed with runes completed Harry's epiphany.

By connecting his mind and Edward's, he could extract information at leisure about their coven with no pressure or constraints of time and place. It was a perfect system. Well, almost perfect. It just had one little flaw- the submissive connection (in this case, Edward) would experience increasingly vivid hallucinations featuring the dominant connection (Harry) that would reflect the emotions of the submissive connection. To say it another way, Edward's feelings for Harry, be they hatred, indifference, or love, would infect the magic threads encircling his brain and manifest in powerful daydream-like experiences.

Harry, having collected himself, disapparatated again. He landed in the warded ex-linen closet that Neville set aside for him when he officially became a fugitive. Most of the old DA members had a place like it set aside, complete with a bedroll and non-perishable food.

He hid out there with Neville for a week. He let his spell do its work and feed him bits of information. It turned out that the Cullens were an anomaly; he had somehow stumbled across a "vegetarian" breed of Vampire. They were no threat to anybody; Carlisle was even a physician! Harry was almost disappointed, but he didn't mind having a connection to Edward's mind.

Edward was a very interesting young (for a Vampire) man. He liked music, and his thoughts often had a distinct beat and harmonious flow. He liked impressionist art, Debussy, and modernist writers like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He loved deer and felt guilty when he ate them. He loved his family, but he preferred solitude to socializing.

Under different circumstances, Edward was exactly the kind of person that Harry would like to form a life-long friendship with; maybe something more than friendship.

But he didn't have time to waste. After his week of rest, he began hunting in earnest. He infiltrated and eradicated several strains of the brutal blood-lusty breed of Vampire. Progress was being made. He had given up on getting rid of the ancient breeds. They were so deeply woven into society that their removal would result in massive collapses in the infrastructure. All he could do about them was a periodic sending out of anonymous warnings to the Ministry officials regarding the Vampire colonies' whereabouts and details of nefarious schemes that he happened to catch wind of.

He was fifty when he completed his closing of the loopholes. It was an amazing feeling. He had destroyed his public reputation and doomed himself to a life spent looking over his shoulder, but the knowledge that Britain was safer than it had been in 700 years made everything alright.

There was nothing left for him to do. The Aurors were drawing close to his heels again, so he took Luna's offer and relocated to Iceland to serve as her (secret) research partner. He lived there with her surrounded by glaciers and creatures for five years. They were happy years, filled with close calls and exciting discoveries. After years of violence, positive interactions with creatures were like a balm on Harry's soul. He wasn't as young as he once was, and his desire to fight had lessened with time.

One long night-day, while buying ingredients for a dinner of fish and potatoes with Luna, he ran into a familiar but half-forgotten face. One moment Harry was perusing the selection of bread in the bakery and the next he found himself face-to-face with a beautiful young man. It was Edward Cullen.

Harry found himself smiling. His survival instincts whispered that, more likely than not, Edward was there for revenge. But Edward smiled back. Feeling a strange tingling sensation, Harry realized that he never had extinguished the spell connecting them. Their proximity to one another combined with more than a decade of reproducing magic created a pleasant feeling in Harry's nervous system.

He felt positively giddy, and, judging from his expression, so did Edward.

Harry hid one hand behind his loaf of bread and made the rune that would allow him to read the spell again. The glimpse he caught into Edward's mind was extremely _interesting. _It looked a lot like Edward's feelings for him were anything but indifference.

Harry felt a swelling of tenderness. Not quite knowing what he was doing, he extended his free hand and took Edward's.

"Hello."

Edward gripped his hand hard enough to make his bones creak. "Harry…."

No words followed, but no more were necessary. Harry had noticed that magic somehow moved in strange and mysterious ways. It was no dumb and blunt force of nature, but nearly a person. Magic was closer to a deity than an element and nearer a mother than a stranger.

He realized what must have been going through Edward's mind all those years. The hallucinations, the daydreams he must have had! Harry would have reddened if he were just a touch younger. Unable to resist, he teased, "Why Edward, haven't you had enough of me yet?"

Edward shook his head. "I could never have too much."

~000~

End Never Too Much

~000~

Note: This is the end for real now. You have to admit that it is better now that you know what the freak was going on with Harry.


End file.
